23 December 2010

There is something homely and charming in the opening of this medieval Langeudoc carol: "Angels in our countryside..." Now part of southern France, the Languedoc has been home to, or invaded by, Greeks, Romans, Phoenicians, Vandals, Visigoths, Saracens, and others I've forgotten to mention. However it came into being, Angels We Have Heard on High fixed a moment of joy in time.

05 December 2010

Turn of the century Vienna was hardly a hospitable place for women. They were discouraged from taking part in public life except as mothers and playthings of men, subject the inconsistencies of a double standard reinforced by untreatable venereal diseases. The obstacles must have seemed enormous but there were women who persisted. Although women were barred from the Viennese Academy until as late as 1920, young women like Broncia Koller-Pinell studied art privately.

Bronislawa Pineles was born on the 23rd of February 1863 in Sonak in Galizia, now part of Poland. The family moved to Vienna in 1870, changing their name to Pinell and becoming part of a growing prosperous Jewish community. Already artistically inclined, Broncia received her instruction at age seven from sculptor Robert Raab. She studied painting with Alois Delug in Vienna and then the Art Academy for women in Munich from 1885-1887. Her early paintings were well received by Viennese critics. After that first successful exhibition in 1885, she would exhibit her work at the legendary Kunsthaus Vienna in 1908 and 1909.

She was introduced to Dr. Hugo Koller (1867–1949) a physician and physicist, by composer Hugo Wolf. Before the marriage, Hugo Koller had to withdraw from the Catholic church because mixed marriages were not permitted between Jew and Catholics at the time. Holy Blood, dedicated to her mother-in-law, suggest that Koller-Pinell may have converted to Catholicism, at least formally or perhaps it is a tribute of affection. (The miniature at the top left corner of the painted frame is a portrait of Frau Koller.)

After their marriage in 1891, Hugo Koller, who was also a collector and art patron, promoted Broncia's career. The couple knew the Secessionists and, later, the members of the Wiener Werkstatte. Like other artists around Gustav Klimt, Koller-Pinell (as she now called herself) worked in the flat, decorative manner of the Secession. The bookplate she designed for Hugo reveals the obsessive book collector who owned several thousand volumes, many of them rarities.

In 1904 the couple inherited a house in Oberwaltersdorf and commissioned Josef Hoffmann to renovate it in the Secessioonst style. The interior was designed jointly by Broncia Koller and Kolo Moser. The Koller home became a popular meeting place for artists and intellectuals including Franz von Zulow and a young Egon Schiele.

Daringly, for her time, Koller-Pinnell painted nudes, most memorably Mariette, sometimes called Seated Nude (at top). Marietta, from Trieste, may look familiar as she often posed for Gustav Klimt. Koller’s arrangement
of bold rectangles as her background includes a golden one behind the model’s
head, perhaps an allusion to the golden mean of the Renaissance.Marietta sits, relaxed yet attentive, a model at work with an artist, not a symbol but
a real woman.In 1907, Koller-Pinell painted The Artist's Mother seatedin profile, which has been compared to James McNeill Whistler's portrait of his mother - high aesthetic praise indeed. Koller-Pinell's nudes radiate a spirit of self-possession; they are not positioned as offerings to the viewer. In common, both portraits have the flattened backgrounds and geometric designs of Secessionist style. Also, Koller-Pinell's woodblock prints are usually square, the shape associated with the influential Jugenstil journal Ver Sacrum.

Frequently she painted her daughter Sylvia and also Anna Mahler, daughter of Gustav Mahler, at least twice Yet Koller-Pinell's name rates no mention in Henri de la Grange's monumental biography of the composer which also gives short shrift to Anna herself. On the pictorial evidence, both girls liked parrots. One wonders about the relationship between the painter and the young girl who went on to become a professional sculptor.

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The Vienna Kunsthaus art show of 1908 was recreated at the Galerie Belvedere in October of 2008. The original epoch making event featured Koller-Pinell's work within the circle of fellow artists: Emil Orlik, Otto Prutscher, Maximilian Kurzweil, and those already named. So far as I can tell, her work was not given its proper place in the recreation.

Elena Luksch Makowska, Tina Blau, Olga Wisinger Florian, and Marie Egner were other successful artists but none equalled Koller's Pinell's curiosity, experimentation, and sure sense of what she could achieve with her art.

Broncia Koller-Pinell died on the 24th of April 1934 in Oberwaltersdorf, before the full horror of National Socialism.

24 November 2010

"Paul Valery used to say: 'A woman who doesn't wear perfume has no future.' Well, he was quite right." - 1966

"Women wear the perfumes they're given as presents. You ought to wear your own, the one you like. If I leave a jacket behind, they know it's mine." - Coco Chanel to Claude Delay, c. 1970

"When my customers come to me, they like to cross the threshold of some magic place; they feel a satisfaction that is perhaps a trace vulgar but that delights them: they are privileged characters who are incorporated into our legend. For them this is a far greater pleasure than ordering another suit. :legend is the consecration of fame." - 1935

"Should you see a rooted tree/ You will always look upon yourself as being healthy/ And should there be many trees/ You goals hall soon be near." - Chanel's number five tarot card

""When did I create it (Chanel No. 5)? In 1920, exactly; upon my return from the war. I had been part of the campaign in a northern region of Europe, above the Arctic Circle, during the midnight sun, where the lakes and rivers exuded a perfume of extreme freshness. I retained this note and recreated it, not without difficulty, for the first aldehydes I was able to find were unstable and unreliable. Why this name? Mademoiselle Chanel, who had a very fashionable couture house, asked me for some perfumes for it. " - Ernest Beaux, 1946

Coco Chanel believed in magic, as well she might, being one of its great practitioners. Magic aside, the coutouriere met the perfumer Ernest Beaux in the summer of 1920 and, delighted with the scent he offered her, called it "a bouquet of abstract flowers." Not for Chanel the modernist, Marcel Proust's associations of scent with nostalgia. Chanel No. 5 debuted in Paris in the spring of 1921, the olfactory accessory to her modernist desings.

Ernest Beaux (1881-1961), although French, was born in Moscow where his family were perfumers to the Tsar. After military service on the side of the Allies during World War I, Beaux was decorated by both the British and the French. He established his laboratory in Grasse, since the 18th century renowned as the world capitol of the perfume industry . The flower farms of Grasse produce jasmine, a 16th century Moorish import, used in many perfumes including Chanel No. 5. Beaux used aldehydes to fix the other ingredients in his composition: ylang-ylang, neroli, May rose, sandalwood and Bourbon vetiver.Images: 1. Andy Warhol - Chanel No. 5, 1965, the Andy Warhol Foundation, NYC.2. Georges Lepape - The Little Black Dress Goes Yellow, 1928, Conde Nast, NYC.3. Pierre Mourgue ( corr. 12/09/10) - Vogue cover 15 June 1928, Code Nast, NYC.4. Jean Pages - Vogue cover April, 1930, Conde Nast, NYC.
Youmay also be interested in French Perfume, posted here July 3, 2009.

22 November 2010

"Stories may be told much better with words. Pictures are for beauty; the feeling that they impart, not the story they tell. Pictures are like poems. A good poem doesn't tell a story; it contains beauty of rhythm." - Bror Julius Olsson Nordfeldt (1878-1955)

The subtle suggestiveness of Nordfeldt's work from the year 1906 whispers the name J.A.M. Whistler. Of course, both artists had been imprinted by their encounters with ukiyo-e prints. Nordfeldt's family emigrated to Chicago from Tulstorg, Sweden in 1891, when Bror was thirteen and, after a stop at the Art Institute School ther from 1898 to 1900, and another one at the Académie Julian in Paris, Nordfeldt studied Japanese printing techniques with Frank Morley Fletcher in England, where he also ecnountered Whistler's prints. Before returning to the United States, where he would lead a peripatetic life, Nordfeldt visited his grandmother in Jonstorp, Sweden, refining his woodblock working methods.

Nothing the artist ever did, not even his experiments with the bold white line technique he crafted with the Provincetown Printers on Cape Cod equaled the prints he made in one charmed year. To my eyes, the subject matter that Nordfeldt instructs us to ignore looks quite like his native Sweden, filtered sometimes through the japoniste style he saw in Parisian galleries. The waves and the drooping tree branches are fairly obvious homages, but the atmospherics Nordfeldt created with his hard-to-define hues are memorable. It is not unusual for an artist to try one thing, and then another. What makes Nordfelt a curious case is that neither a bolder use of color nor a turn to painting seems to have suited his talents so well. Did he see his work as we see it?

Images: Untitled, Figures Among the Trees, Anglers.The Mist, and Moonrise are woodblock prints by B.J. O. Nordfeldt are from the collection of the Smithsonian Museum of American Art, Washington, D.C.

20 November 2010

"Now, if you can forgive someone for immersing himself in pictures..."

"So please don't think I am renouncing anything, I am reasonably faithful in my unfaithfulness and although I have changed, I am still the same, and what preys on my mind is simply this one question: what am I good for, could I not be of service in some way, how can I become more knowledgeable and study some subject or other in depth?"

- excerpts from a letter by Vincent Van Gogh to his brother Theo, July, 1880.

"Well, even in these depths of misery I felt my energy revive & said to myself, I shall get over it somehow, I shall get to work again with my pencil, which i had cast aside in my deep dejection, & I shall draw again, & ever since I have had the feeling that everything has changed for me, & now i am in my stride & my pencil has become slightly more willing & seems to be getting more so by the day. My over-long & over- intense misery had discouraged me so much hat i was unable to do anything."

"...I cannot tell you how happy I am that I have taken up drawing again. I had been thinking about it for a long time, but always considered it impossible & beyond my abilities. But now, though I continue to be conscious of my failings & of my depressing dependence on a great many things, now I have recovered my peace of mind & my energy increases by the day."

"At the same time I must tell you that I cannot remain very much longer in the little room where I live now. It is very small indeed, and then there are the two beds as well, the children's & my own. And now that I am working on Bargue's fairly large sheets I cannot tell you how difficult it is. I don't want to upset these people's domestic arrangements."

- excerpts from a letter by Vincent Van Gogh to his brother Theo, Cuesmes, September 24, 1880., translated from the Dutch by Arnold Pomerans in The Letters of Vincent Van Gogh, New York, Penguin Books: 1996.

Cuesmes is a small village in the Walloon region of southern Belgium. Vincent Van Gogh (1853-1890) arrived from Amsterdam in 1878, to be a worker-priest among the coal miners of the Borinage. Emile Zola's novel Germinal (1885) is a portrait of that difficult world. In July, 1879, Van Gogh lost that job, yet another rejection for one who yearned to give of himself to other people. After great anguish, he found a spiritual vocation in art. "I must continue to follow the path I take now. If I do nothing, if I study nothing, if I cease searching, then, woe is me, I am lost. That is how I look at it — keep going, keep going come what may."

Today the old brick house gives none of that history away.

﻿Images:

1. The Magrot House At Cuesmes - photograph by Jean-Paul Grandmont, 2006.

12 November 2010

The first question most people ask about Harry Van der Weyden (1868-1952) is whether he was descended from the great Flemish painter Rogier Van der Weyden (c. 1399-1464). Art historians answer with a resounding "Maybe."

He was born in Boston, he won a scholarship to the Slade School in London at age nineteen, and studied at the Académie Julian in Paris in 1890-1891. Until World War I, he lived near Etaples at Montreuil-sur-Mer on the Normandy coast. During the war Van der Weyden worked as a camouflage officer with the British Royal Engineers from 1916 to 1918 when Etaples was a major transit point and storage depot for the British. He died in London in 1952. Most of Van der Weyden's paintings are in private collections and tonalism, although a small part of his work, showed him at his best.
The sun was almost below the horizon on the evening in 1898 that Van der Weyden set out to paint. In the shadow of the cliffs at left, two men anchor a boat while another man rows toward shore and into the shadows. Looking closely, you find a varied palette of tones has went into the making of this lavender-blue image. The affinity with early photography is obvious in tonalism's monochromatic effects.

You may also be interested in Ben Foster: American Tonalist, posted here March 20, 2008.

10 November 2010

Belgian artists responded to Impressionism by doing something rather different than their French neighbors, their brushwork more subdued, their effects more akin perhaps to photography. It has been called Luminism, and it has its counterpart in America that goes by the same name. One characteristic they share is the strength of their work compared to the blandness of their compatriots who tried to copy the French.

It is the quality of the light that attracts me to these paintings by the Belgian Emile Claus (1849-1934). In the 1880s, Claus bought a cottage in Astene, near Ghent, where he lived for the rest of his life. He called it 'Villa Sunshine' in recognition the inspiration he took from the quality of light there.

The artist found something remarkable in the old tree, painting it repeatedly, even breaking the rule that he probably taught his own students: never put your subject directly at the center of the image. Yet Claus persuades us as he makes light gather around the tree in The Artist's House at Astene, reflecting off the house, or as the tree in The Tree In Autumn appears to draw the fading light of autumn into itself with its intense need.

07 November 2010

"There! See the line of lights,
A chain of stars down either side the street --" from A November Night by Sara Teasdale.

"The landscape sleeps in mist from morn till noon;
And, if the sun looks through, 'tis with a face
Beamless and pale and round, as if the moon,
When done the journey of her nightly race,
Had found him sleeping, and supplied his place." - from November by John Clare

In the month of November it is often evening, poets remind us, as the days grow shorter and the nights extend their domain.

"VICTOR GILSOUL (1869-1939 - ed.) is one of the truest living followers of the old Flemish school. One sees reflected in his work much of the rich heritage left by the masters of Flanders–a heritage priceless in its influence on the art of all time. Born in the capital of Belgium in the year 1867, Gilsoul played as a child in an environment rich in memories of Rubens and Van Dyck. His earliest inclination was towards art, and at fourteen years of age he began his studies at the Academie des Beaux-Arts in Antwerp. By the time he was fifteen he had won the first landscape prize and had seen enough of the difficult side of painting to make him determined in his desire. On returning to Brussels after barely eighteen months' study in the Antwerp Academy, he came under the influence of d'Artan and Franz Courtans, the two men who gave him his first taste of open air painting, a charm which quickly enwrapped him, and which has done more, perhaps, than anything else to determine his ambition. When seventeen years old he got his first painting admitted into the Brussels Salon–a simple little study of a wind-mill, but it won the youthful painter his first taste of public distinction, and he has ever since been well represented in the Brussels, Antwerp, and Ghent Exhibitions. Gilsoul's first big success was about fifteen years ago, with a picture representing a train in a cutting at night."

- from THE ART OF VICTOR GILSOUL. by Lenore Van Der Veer, from The Studio, Volume 33, issue Number 140, November 1904.

Image: November Evening In Dordrecht, c. 1896, Royal Museum of Fine Arts, Brussels.

11 October 2010

Eline Vere by Louis Couperus has often been compared to Tolstoy's Anna Karenina (1878), as though great novels with female protagonists are so odd as to require a segregated genre. More apt comparisons with Kate Chopin's The Awakening (1899), rescued from oblivion by feminist scholars or Maurice Guest (1908) by Henry Handel Richardson another brilliant first novel of obsession that still languishes. Both were written by women, which only highlights Couperus's ability to create fully realized female characters. His understanding of the experience of emotional turmoil, often dismissed as neurasthenia in women, remains exemplary.

A capacious novel, Eline Vere is like Tolstoy's great novels in presenting a large cast of characters, each one fully developed with a place in the story that only makes Eline's tragedy the more poignant. Frederique, also twenty-three, is able to reconcile her inner turmoil with her need to connect with others. While Eline, with a loving family, admiring friends, and numerous suitors, remains isolated within herself, unruly egotism her only avenue of expression. She rejects both Otto and St. Clare as alien, and mistakes Victor's similarities for genuine feeling.

In the late 19th century northwestern Europe enjoyed a balance of prosperity and stability by comparison with more volative neighbors France and Great Britiain. Yet this equilibrium often felt like stasis to those who lived it. What could be more suggestive then, than the novel's first chapter that introduces the cast of main characters as they prepare to present tableaux vivant at a party? This theatrical entertainment, gone like the parlor piano, was once a popular excuse to get into costume and get up make believe scenes from history, mythology, or imitate famous paintings. Significantly, Eline Vere is absent from the festivities.

Eline Vere's imaginative capabilities are alive to the darker dimensions of life, alienating her from her enviably comfortable existence. After an argument with her sister Betsey and beloved brother-in-law Henk with whom she lives, Eline find refuge with a former schoolmate, Jeanne, who lives with husband and children in more precarious circumstances. Eline and Freddie, by contrast, lead such circumscribed lives that, in their twenties they remain trapped in adolescence like insects in amber. A paradox, still timely, is that creature comforts make freedom of action possible, but attenuated hunger and self-wasting are just as possible outcomes.

The novel feels much less dated than you might imagine. Theories of hereditary influence have been drastically overhauled from those Couperus drew on, but we still recognize its formative influence on temperament. In the relationship between Eline and her cousin Vincent, Couperus prefigures Carl Jung's theory of personality. When Vincent suggests that one can easily live a life based on one's own free will, Eline responds with passion: "But being independent, doing eaxctly as you please...that takes more moral courage than most of us possess."

Eline's capabilities count for so little that the reader could easily miss them. She is fluent in French and English, her musicality, playing piano and singing, brings great pleasure to those around her but ends in an obsession with a second rate opera singer. Her avid interest in the workings of the mind brings her no peace or resolution. She breaks off her engagement to Otto van Erlsvooert, a kind, loving man because she cannot imagine the emotional equilibrium needed to sustain love.

One of the great Dutch writers, Louis Couperus (1863-1923) was the youngest of eleven children of a councilor to the Netherlands High Courts. When Louis was nine, the family was posted to the Dutch East Indies for six years. Back in The Hague, his first poem was published in 1883, and in January of 1887, Couperus's first novel Eline Verve began a year long serialization in the newspaper. After it was published in book form to immediate acclaim, Couperus spent a year in Paris (1890), returning to marry his childhood sweetheart, Elisabeth Baud, in September, 1891.

Couperus's versatility is impressive, ranging from psychological, mythological and historical novels to fairy-tales and journalism. An admirer of Hendrik Ibsen's plays, Couperus was ffundamentally pessimistic, his themes work themselves out fictionally on many levels, individual, cultural, political. The internal workings of individual temperament struggle wirh mysterious and incomprehensible forces of fate. In counterpoint, a strong

aesthetic sense asserts itself in the consoling power of beauty.

The Couperus revival in English comes by way of Pushkin Press, U.K., which publishes Eline Vere along with Inevitable and Psyche. In the United States, Archipelago Press of Brooklyn is the publisher of Eline Vere, translated impressively by Ina Rilke, also known for her translation of Sijie Dai's Balzac And the Little Chinese Seamstress.

26 September 2010

long with a madeleine half-eaten in his fingers." - from Compendium Dachsundium by Matthea Harvey, Everyman's Library, 2003.

Lovable and slightly disreputable, even when domesticated, the Nabi dogs of Pierre Bonnard are irresistible scene stealers.

Bonnard himself did not have an “irresistible passion for painting”, according to his friend Annette Vaillant, but after failing to pass his civil service examination and his failure to win the Prix de Rome, his success with his poster for France-Champagne in 1891 was especially sweet. And influential - it inspired Toulouuse-Lautrec to give the popular new medium a go.

Whether pampered pets of the bourgeoisie or scraggly privateers, dogs in Bonnard's work are equally personable. If these pictures were plays, the dogs would get the best lines. In Bonnard's affectionate depiction of his sister Andree and her adored dog Ravageau, Andree and Ravageau form a tightly knit group between themselves. We see Andree again in The Game Of Croquet, dog at her side, part of a tableau where the composer Claude Terrasse is upstaged by the happy pair. The pattern of the leaves looks like paper cut-outs; the flatttened colors and diffuse perspectives are evidence of the artist's interest in ukiyo-e prints.

On the streets of Paris in the late 19th century fully a quarter of working people labored at the endless making and maintaining of clothing. In The Little Laundress (1895) the girl carrying a heavy load of clean laundry and the spotted dog are fellows. Interestingly, a preliminary sketch placed a trio of people standing on the sidewalk, but their removal serves to suggest a correspondence between the two characters. Painted during the same year Place Clichy could be the little laundress's employer taking her dogs for a walk. Something about her extravagantly ruffled collar connects this woman and these capering dogs.

Although carefully plotted, Bonnard's street scenes are casual affairs, anecdotes of urban life, ofetn likened to the prints of Ando Hiroshige for the way his characters are flattened on the surface of the picture. Sometimes the dogs are mere silhouettes but, even so, they exude a liveliness that suggests Bonnard was as captivated by them as we are.

30 August 2010

Another student of Arthur Wesley Dow's at Pratt Institute in New York, Pedro de Lemos (1882-1945) is known as an artist of the west coast, particularly the Monterey Peninsula, on view in these woodblock prints, made the 1920s.

What gives the cypress trees of Monterey their sublime aspect is the way that they make visible the sculpting power of the wind that bends the trees and erodes the soil, making them cling to the cliff sides. There is drama in these images and a sense of impermanence in this large, rocky landscape, suggested by the artist's rather romantic titles.

Pedro de Lemos was instrumental in organizing the graphic arts at the 1915 Panama-Pacific International Exposition in San Francisco. He taught design and architecture at Stanford University and was the first director of the Carmel Art Association in 1927. He also founded the Allied Artists Guild in Menlo Park. The stucco home he designed for himself at Palo Alto, Hacienda de Lemos, has been lovingly restored to his original intentions.

Images:

1. Old Pines At Monterey, c. 1915, American Federation of the Arts, NYC.

28 August 2010

"All the planets in heaven, all the stars,gave my lord their graces at his conception;all gave him their special gifts,to make one perfect mortals man.Saturn gave loftiness of understanding,Jove the desire for noble deeds,Mars more skill in war than any other,Phoebus Apollo elegance and wit.Venus gave him beauty and gentle ways,Mercury eloquence; but the moon alonemade him too freezing cold for me.Every one of those rare gracesmakes me burn for his brilliant flame,and one alone has turned him into ice."- Gaspara Stampa, from Gaspara Stampa, translated from the Italian by Sally Purcell, Greville Press: 1984.

One of the great poets of the Italian Renaissance and, I think, the equal of Petrarch, Gaspara Stampa (1523-1554) was born in Padua and grew up in Venice, where the Stampa family home became a salon where Gaspara and her sister gave musical performances together. During her short life only a few poems were published; most circulated in manuscript form. It was Gaspara's sister who arranged for the publication of Rime, a collection more than 300 poems, after Gaspara died.

Giuliano d'Arrigo (1367-1446) created this fresco for the Sacristy of San Lorenzo at Florence. It shows the night sky over Florence as it looked on 4 July 1442. Visit Museo Galilio here.

30 July 2010

"Line in Guimard, just as in the Japanese guides, is a living incarnation of natural laws. Thus, in an old Japanese manual, there is a catalogue of eighteen different types of line, with such descriptions as ‘floating silk threads’ ropes’ water lines’ or ‘bent metal wire.’ This latter was particularly subtly used by Guimard, who had an inborn sense of the inner tension of line.” - Dore Ashton in Le Monde, 22 May 1970:

French architect Hector Guimard (1867-1942) realized the decorative possibilities of glazed lava, a substance made from mixing pulverized lava with clay when he built a villa for Louis Coillot, (1898-1900) a ceramics manufacturer in Lille who monopolised the distribution of the material. Guimard sided the entire facade of Maison Coilliot in lava stone.

Guimard also used glazed lava to great effect in the nameplate for Castel Henriette (built 1899 - demolished 1969), as well as for his famous signs for the Paris Metro. He designed the graphics for his signs, and here we can see him introduce geometric elements that tend toward asbtraction. The outline of the letters and their rhythm give added emphasis and harmonize the pinks and yellows he used.

In a twist of fate, a largely forgotten Guimard died in New York City in 1942, after fleeing Paris to ensure the safety of his Jewish wife.

29 July 2010

“Nowhere is there greater beauty of line than in their curving creeks and irregular pools.” - Charles Downing Lay, Tidal Marshes, 1911, Landscape Architecture.

It seems to me that a meandering stream is an objective correlative to the feelings we associate with summer. A meandering walk on a warm day is fine match for body and soul. Marsh creeks meander through the works of Massachusetts native Arthur Wesley Dow (1857-1922). One of Dow's favorite spots along the Ipswich River was nicknamed 'The Dragon'. You can see one version of it in the background of the woodcut Rain In May and it is the subject of Study Of A Marsh (above).

Nature is often the starting point for design and the meander is a fine example. Rhythmic, ornamental patterns used in art and architecture are known as the Meander, named after the Meander River in southwestern Turkey. Its twists and turns include U-shaped oxbow lakes formed where the river changes doubles back on itself. The first mention that I know of for the Meander River occurs in Homer's Iliad, circa 8th century BCE. And what defines Homeric style if not the long-drawn, winding simile? In the 8th book of Metamorphoses (circa 8 CE), Ovid compares the labyrinth on the island of Crete to the Meander River in Asia Minor. The Greek Fret, a series of square protrusions resembling the notches of a key, originated as an architectural element, and is an early instance of the meander in art. Later the design was adapted by the Romans, along with other plunder, for use in mosaic tiles. A Medieval version of the meander was the Twisted Ribbon pattern, the rectilinear elements softened with curves. A few years ago, the Cooper-Hewitt Museum of Design in New York hosted The Continuing Curve, an exhibition that looked for the roots of Art Nouveau and its current revivals in the Roccoco period. I enjoyed it, but the seduction of meandering has a much longer history.

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Why The Blue Lantern ?

A blue-shaded lamp served as the starboard light for writer Sidonie-Gabrielle Colette's imaginary journeys after she became too frail to leave her bedroom at the Palais Royale. Her invitation, extended to all, was "Regarde!" Look, see, wonder, accept, live.

"I think of myself as being in a line of work that goes back about twenty-five thousand years. My job has been finding the cave and holding the torch. Somebody has to be around to hold the flaming branch, and make sure there are enough pigments." - Calvin Tompkins